The White Negro: Norman Mailer's racial bodies - Jewish - Critical Essay
Norman Mailer's 1957 essay "The White Negro" has long been regarded as a paradigmatic example of the white male investment in African American masculinity. Few contemporary discussions of the meanings that white men make of 'blackness' fail to invoke Mailer's essay; (1) indeed, his work often serves to name a whole US tradition of interracial desire and fantasy, from nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy and the white romance with Harlem Renaissance 'primitivism,' to Elvis Presley and the countless interracial male 'buddy' films that Hollywood continues to produce. (2) "The Cheap Essays White Negro" is certainly a part of this genealogy, as Eric Lott reminds us when he calls Mailer's essay "the twentieth century reinvention of [the] ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations" that animated minstrel performance (Love and Theft 54). But critical attention to the continuity of this tradition has been perhaps too insistent, working to obscure a central historical referent of Mailer's famous piece. The white preoccupation with black masculinity takes on new resonances, I will suggest, when a Jewish writer begins his 1957 essay with an allusion to the "psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom Cheap Essays bomb" (338).
When critics do locate Mailer's essay within its historical moment, (3) they tend to align it with other 1950s expressions of "generational rebellion" that appealed to the presumed authenticity of blackness to deliver white hipsters from the bleak conformity of the nuclear age. (4) Mailer's celebration of the downtown hip subculture does recall, for instance, Jack Kerouac's paean to the "life, joy, kicks, darkness ... night" he believed were the province of the "Negro" (181), while Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" suggests as well that the beats looked to black culture to "fix their needs" (Lhamon 72). But it Cheap Essays is the specificity of Mailer's racial fixation that I want to examine here, precisely because it has so often been called upon to describe a collective or a generational desire. When Mailer recoils from the "stench of fear [that] has come out of every pore of American life" and when he declares that the "heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis" (355), he seeks to vanquish something more particular than the generic postwar anomie he invokes. Mailer's effort to appropriate a powerful phallic 'blackness' for the white hipster functions in part to Cheap Essays mask the presence of another racial body: the Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust.
Mailer's project here is of course by no means an unprecedented one. As Paul Breines and others have amply documented, there is a long history of efforts by Jewish male writers in the US--such as Mike Gold, Gerald Green, and Irwin Shaw, among many others--to "remasculinize" (5) the Jewish body, both before and after World War II, according to dominant notions of physical courage and heterosexual virility. (6) And as 1 suggest below, critics have paid ample attention to those Jewish male writers, ranging from Cheap Essays Norman Podhoretz on the right to Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce on the left, who have worked prolifically both to worry about and to celebrate their own presumed linkages to African American masculinity. Mailer's essay occupies a peculiar place in this history, however. Ritually invoked in academic discussions of Jewish masculinity, "The White Negro" is at once read as a Jewish literary production by a Jewish male writer and, as Jeffrey Melnick suggests, simultaneously repositioned as a symptomatic expression of white male desire and anxiety. While Melnick aptly reminds us that "the history of white Negroism in the American Cheap Essays twentieth century is a cultural field defined primarily by middle-class Jews engaged in significant acts of individual and group identity formation" (120), I argue here that the essay's own systematic occlusions have functioned successfully to re-write white Negroism as exactly that--white Negroism. My focus on Mailer here, then, does not reflect an effort to position him as the singular creator of a refurbished Jewish masculinity in the postwar era. Rather, I seek to illuminate, through close readings of the tortured operations of "The White Negro" and Mailer's other contemporaneous fiction, the problematic silences, both in terms of gender Cheap Essays and race, that the essay and its dominance within a particular academic discourse, continue to perpetuate.
Reading the specter of a vulnerable Jewish body back into "The White Negro" allows us to understand Mailer's construction of the virile white hipster as more than just another episode of predictable macho posturing. Instead, his preoccupation with the masculinity of the "psychopathic" African American serves as a defense against the taint of femininity often imputed to the male Jew. Recent work in Jewish cultural studies foregrounds the central role of gender in shaping images of the Jew; Sander Gilman, for instance, has Cheap Essays documented the feminizing rhetoric of anti-semitic discourse in Western Europe around the turn of the century. (7) As Ann Pellegrini writes, "the feminization of the Jewish male body was so frequent a theme in this period that Jewishness--more precisely the Jewishness of Jewish men--became as much a category of gender as of race" (108). In Tough Jews, his study of images of Jews in American culture since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Paul Breines maintains that the "body of ... a victim," with its "'narrow shoulders ... shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees,'" is the "body [that] crystallizes Cheap Essays the history of hapless Jewish suffering." Breines points out saliently, "the most potent Jewish bodily image of all [is] the Jewish corpse in the Nazi death camp" (16). Breines, then, explicitly links representations of Jews killed in the Holocaust with a long history of associations between the weak, defective, feminized body and the Jew.
"The White Negro's" fetishization of an aggressive African American response to a history of persecution is in part an effort to obscure the image of the cowed, impotent Jew, going meekly to the gas chamber: an image that nonetheless haunts the essay. Long overlooked by Cheap Essays critics, Mailer's attempt to eclipse this shameful spectre has engendered yet another form of critical silence: what appear to be exclusively male forms of identification and fantasy in the text in fact rely on an abstract deprecation of femininity as well as on the presence of actual female figures who themselves tend to be erased from readings of the essay. Mailer's repudiation of the feminine works implicitly in "The White Negro" and more explicitly in his other roughly contemporaneous works, including the novel An American Dream (1964), as a desperate effort to master Jewishness itself.
My rereading of what Cheap Essays is arguably the most famous twentieth-century academic example of the white appropriation of "blackness" intervenes simultaneously in two different critical conversations. One is, of course, the important body of work on interracial identifications and desires on the part of white men; disrupting the all-male, racially binary terms, Mailer presents works to challenge constructions of this tradition that imply the homogeneity and masculinity of "whiteness" itself. At the same time, my essay complicates those analyses that do engage specifically with Jewish invocations of black identity. Perhaps the best-known of these is Michael Rogin's brilliant reading of the film The Cheap Essays Jazz Singer, in which he demonstrates that the Jewish use of blackface in the early twentieth century functioned to secure a Jewish claim to whiteness. (8) When Rogin aligns Jewishness with a normative whiteness, he illuminates the discursive and material force of the racial binary in the United States. (9)
But the fact that critics have so consistently positioned Jewishness in relation to the dominant racial binary, I want to suggest, has also elided the important connections in US racial discourse between American Jewishness and 'racial' categories other than blackness and whiteness, be these relations between Jews and "Aryans" Cheap Essays or the recent nomination of Asian Americans as the "New Jews" (see Liu). The latter instance of course points to the ways in which analogies between Jewishness and various forms of "otherness" may be deployed to regulate or pathologize still other racial minorities, but even this process extends beyond the categories of blackness and whiteness. Examining the place of Jewishness within a complex, multi-racial politics, inflected by historical and political events that take place outside as well as within our national borders, can help us to interrogate America's racial Manicheanism and the hierarchical forms it naturalizes.
In this essay, Cheap Essays I take "The White Negro" not only as an exemplary instance of interracial male identification, but also as a site of an important shift in the shape of such identifications. While part of the tense appeal of the minstrel show was its imagined potential to elide racial boundaries, it was fundamentally predicated on the idea of mimicry, rather than on the possibility that a white performer might really assume a black subject position. Yet, as Gayle Wald explains in her discussion of the white Jewish jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, who identified himself as black, and whose autobiography "helped Cheap Essays to inspire" Mailer's essay, "by the 1920s, not only would whites find jazz worthy of overt admiration and emulation, but 'marginality' itself would become an object of 'mainstream' cultural desire" (59). White hipsters, then, came to disdain pallid imitation and to aspire instead genuinely to inhabit a marginal position. Mezzrow's autobiography thus presents his "blackness" less as a deliberate mode of self-transformation than as an expression of "something already latent within himself"; the text works simultaneously to naturalize Mezzrow's racial identifications and to obscure the agency involved in producing them (Wald 65).
"The White Negro" similarly trades in the Cheap Essays language of racial authenticity, but rather than appealing to the presence within the white hipster of a preexisting "black self," Mailer maintains that the hipster must evacuate all traces of his prior self before he can truly embrace blackness. The brand of individualism Mailer champions in "The White Negro" and in his other essays of the period demands that one maintain a critical distance not only from the American 'culture of consensus' but from one's own history as well: "the only life-giving answer is to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious Cheap Essays imperatives of the self" ("White Negro" 339). Mailer's insistence here that passionate self-exploration entails a revolt against "roots" of course seems paradoxical; those very "roots" are a vital constituent of the "self" he claims to pursue. This apparent paradox, however, begins to make more sense when one considers the nature of the "roots" that the "white Negro" is quite literally able to cast off.
What Mailer depicts as a means of effecting a definitive break from exhausted traditions also turns out to offer the hipster a kind of autonomous rebirth that liberates him from the constraints of inheritance:
what Cheap Essays characterizes every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they
[sic] are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves.
Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been
formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits
the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu.... It
is ... not only the 'dead weight of the institutions of the past'
but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of
the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new
possibilities. (345)
Throughout the essay, Mailer repeatedly refers to the outdated Cheap Essays "nervous system" that the hipster must jettison; the phrase manages to evoke both the cultural and biological dimensions of heredity. The remnants of the past that course through the "circuits" of the would-be hipster's "nervous system" are imaged in biological terms; they are part of one's internal wiring. These synaptic connections are shaped not merely by genetics, however, but also by environment, what Mailer calls "our early milieu." The body, in Mailer's fearful conception, is itself marked by family and by culture, and the successful hipster must therefore undergo a neurological transplant: "the hipster has absorbed the existentialist Cheap Essays synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes can be considered a white Negro" (341). In remaking his own "nervous system," then, the hipster is able to eradicate both a biological and a cultural past, dispelling the influence of each of the ostensible determinants of "race." (10)
Mailer's hipster is motivated not only by the vision of the radical new self he might create, but also by a desire for absolute agency, free from the impress of "other people's habits," or other people's history (339). In an effort to effect a rhetorical quarantine of history itself, Mailer writes, "if Cheap Essays the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, the 'past' ... is not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively a hundred or two hundred years old" (345). The sense of dislocation often produced by the events of the twentieth century notwithstanding, there is something peculiar in Mailer's attempt to make an anachronism of even the recent past, deleting it from the contemporary field of vision and installing it safely in the vague reaches of the eighteenth century. It is only in this radically ahistorical landscape, unfettered by either personal or generational connections to the Cheap Essays past, that the hipster can thrive.
And the essay strongly suggests that the past the hipster obliterates is not, in fact, generic "dead weight," but a particularly Jewish one. Mailer's preoccupation with the nervous system that the hipster by definition seeks to escape implicitly evokes the terms of Jewish embodiment; Sander Gilman notes that early twentieth-century European medical discourse presumed that, "Jews are prone to disorders of the nervous system" (Jew's Body 63). Mailer's own vexed "early milieu," of course, was Jewish Brooklyn. I am not presuming that anything like a "Jewish aesthetic" can be discerned in the work Cheap Essays of a writer like Mailer, who is Jewish by the definitions of Jewish religious law, and who self-identifies as a Jew in other contexts. Nor am I equating Jewishness with a consciousness of the Holocaust. But I do want to suggest that in the historical moment in which Mailer writes, and given the explicit occasion for the essay--the nuclear-era, totalitarian fears that Mailer invokes--that the essay's loud silences about Nazi Germany, along with its celebration of an aggressive masculine response to a physical threat and its relentless effort to position both history and the feminine at an impossible Cheap Essays remove from the hipster, do speak to anxieties about the vulnerable Jewish body, that in the popular imagination, went meekly to its death. While the hipster's original nervous system had threatened to "strangle" him, in his newer incarnation, the "psychopath" derives an "incandescent consciousness" from the "possibilities within death." No enervated pawn in the master plan of a maniac, the hipster learns to exploit the threat of death for the "electric present" it can bestow (342)
Even the hipster's use of language serves to liberate him from the vestiges of cultural tradition or inheritance. The language of Hip precludes Cheap Essays imitation or study: "what makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught--if one shares none of the experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely arch or vulgar or irritating" (348). Only immediate sensual experience, and not the scholarly rigor so often associated with Jews, will afford authentic access to the language of Hip. In "Hipster and Beatnik," an essay Mailer appended to "The White Negro" when he republished it in Advertisements for Myself, he explicitly opposes the hipster's language to that of the "beatnik," who Mailer Cheap Essays informs us is "often Jewish." He explains: "the beatnik uses the [Hip] vocabulary; the hipster has that muted animal voice which shivered the national attention when first used by Marlon Brando" (373). While "vocabulary" offers anyone the chance to be a ventriloquist, to appropriate another's special language, the visceral resources of the hipster's "voice" bespeaks its rightful possession of the language and of the very experiences that engendered the language itself.
Western culture has long believed in a distinct "Jewish voice," creating persistent representations of a Jew who is never truly "at home" in the German, or English, language:
Cheap Essays The image of the Jew who sounds too Jewish is the counter-image of
the hidden language of the Jew ... the informed listener hears the
Jew hidden within no matter whether this difference is overt or
disguised. (Gilman, Jew's Body 19)
As opposed to the ruthlessly interrogated Jewish voice, always subject to scrutiny and interpretation, the hipster's language, identical to what it describes, functions precisely to assure that there is nothing "hidden within." No hipster seeks to conceal his identity, and his true listeners are his privileged intimates, rather than a hostile crowd of verbal detectives. The hipster's manifest Cheap Essays authenticity may work to protect him from even the threat of unmasking that haunted European Jews, most disastrously, of course, during Hitler's regime. In turn, Mailer's own efforts in "The White Negro" to conceal any recognizable Jewish "voice" are perhaps most concerted when he speaks obliquely of the Holocaust itself.
The extent to which American Jews in the postwar period spoke of, and even thought of, the murder of European Jews by the Nazis has become a subject of some debate. In a controversial recent book, Peter Novick argues that a particular set of historical and political exigencies, such Cheap Essays as the end of the Cold War and the rise of "identity politics," transformed a broad postwar critique of totalitarianism into a more contemporary discourse emphasizing the atrocities committed against European Jews. Novick maintains that specifically Jewish suffering played a distinctly marginal role in postwar public discourse, a claim that might seem to account for Mailer's own tendency to construct racially "unmarked" victims in his discussion of totalitarian murders. (11) But the explanation Novick offers for this public silence, that American Jews recoiled from the image of Jews as victims, only reinforces my suggestion that it was precisely Cheap Essays the effort to evade such an image that impelled the silences of Mailer's essay. (12)
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